Research at Glaxo gives hope to HIV sufferers

Further hope of a breakthrough in anti-Aids drug research was raised by GlaxoSmithKline yesterday after the firm announced its alternative approach to combating the condition could be on the market in four years.

It is one of a number of positive announcements to come out of the 14th International Conference on Aids in Barcelona. Earlier this week, US company VaxGen said it could have an Aids vaccine on the market within five years.

The UK company, which has been embroiled in controversy over the amount it charges for its anti-Aids drugs in the US, told the conference that it had expanded early-stage trials of its integrase inhibitor.

The drug - which had previously only been tested for side effects on a sample group of 24 people - works by blocking HIV's capacity to insert its genes into a cell's normal DNA.

Glaxo is developing the drug in partnership with Japanese firm Shionogi & Co. Preliminary trials, involving healthy volunteers, have shown few side effects other than occasional skin rashes and headaches, the company said.

Glaxo said it had started trials to test the efficacy of the drug on 100 HIV-infected patients in the US, with results expected early next year.

While the announcement is likely to give hope to many with HIV around the world, it was not enough to impact Glaxo's share price. Yesterday, shares in the company closed down 1p at £13.40.

A spokesman acknowledged that the trials of the integrase inhibitor were too experimental to merit an official announcement to the stock exchange - a legal requirement in the event of any market sensitive news.

Integrase is one of the three enzymes necessary for HIV to replicate in the body. The others - reverse tanscriptase and protease - are already targeted by a number of existing treatments, but integrase has proved difficult for drug researchers to tackle.

Dr Michelle Berrey, Glaxo's director of discovery medicine for viral diseases, told Reuters: "Integrase has been a difficult target for a number of reasons ... It's very exciting to be hitting this target and the question of how it would be used in combination [therapy] is most interesting."

· AstraZeneca said the latest trials of its heart drug Crestor showed that it is better at reducing cholesterol levels than rival drugs.

The company hopes sales of the drug will outstrip Pfizer's rival statin product, Lipitor. Lipitor is currently the world's biggest-selling drug, with sales last year approaching £6.5bn.

But the AstraZeneca drug is yet to be approved by the US food and drug administration, which recently hinted that this decision could be delayed because of concerns over statin side effects.

One of the latest statin products on the market, Bayer's Baycol, had to be withdrawn after it was linked to more than 100 deaths.